Probabilistic Reasoning about Actions in Nonmonotonic Causal Theories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a probabilistic extension of the action language C+ called mP C+ for reasoning about actions with uncertain effects, providing a formal semantics based on probabilistic state transitions.

Contribution

It presents a new formal language mP C+ that integrates probabilistic reasoning into nonmonotonic causal theories for actions, extending prior deterministic frameworks.

Findings

Formal semantics based on probabilistic state transitions

Concise formulation of reasoning problems about actions

Framework handles nondeterministic and probabilistic effects

Abstract

We present the language {m P}{cal C}+ for probabilistic reasoning about actions, which is a generalization of the action language {cal C}+ that allows to deal with probabilistic as well as nondeterministic effects of actions. We define a formal semantics of {m P}{cal C}+ in terms of probabilistic transitions between sets of states. Using a concept of a history and its belief state, we then show how several important problems in reasoning about actions can be concisely formulated in our formalism.